Whatever happened to Johnny Depp?

This blog is prompted by a curious conflation of events. The other night I was at the cinema to see the new Hunger Games movie – overlong and a bit dull, since you ask – when I caught a trailer for something called Dirty Grandpa which allegedly stars Robert De Niro.

That Robert De Niro. The man we all thought was the greatest actor of his generation, playing an elderly perv on a road trip with Zac Efron; and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Then the following day I was watching Black Mass with Johnny Depp, another contender for The Greatest Actor of His Generation (TGAOHG). And I wondered, whatever happened to Johnny Depp?

Apart from De Niro, others saddled with the TGAOHG tag have not done well. Laurence Olivier for example with his trousers round his ankles getting jiggy with a parlour maid in The Betsy, Anthony Hopkins chewing the scenery as an old exorcist in The Rite, or Jack Nicholson having to take cues from Adam Sandler in Anger Management. And now Johnny Depp seems set to join that unhappy band.

Depp was a genuine contender as one of the greatest screen actors ever. He was a minimalist whose work illuminated films like Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. What was also so charming about him then was the way that all he cared about was the work; he seemed genuinely interested in being an actor rather than a star. But here he is in Black Mass, TGAOHG hiding behind some oversized contact lenses and a bald wig, pretty much phoning it in.

The tragedy is that, even in phoning it in, it’s the closest thing he’s given to a real performance since Finding Neverland more than ten years ago. Depp has come down with a bad case of star fever, which struck him in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie and reached crisis point in The Lone Ranger. He became a parody and was playing Jack Sparrow even when he wasn’t in a Pirates movie.

I was delighted to see him sign on for Black Mass, the true story of how Boston gangster Whitey Bulger conned the FBI into making him the effective king of the city’s underworld. Perhaps he had left the mugging and the special effects behind. Early trailers looked good, which is what they are supposed to do after all, but the finished film is a disappointment. It never comes across as any more than Goodfellas-lite.

Actually if you are a director aspiring to make a decades-spanning American gangster movie you should pretty well avoid seedy barroom scenes and a period soundtrack. It just reminds people of how good a film Goodfellas is. To be honest, though I loved his first two pictures, director Scott Cooper seems a little out of his depth here. The project is maybe too big and he never puts his stamp on it.

TGAOHG in particular seems not be directed at all; unless of course the direction was ‘Johnny, in this scene you’re phoning it in – again.’ For an actor who formerly lit up characters from within, it is disappointing to see him resort to props, make-up and the occasional grimace. At the end of the film we know little about Whitey Bulger that we couldn’t have Googled.

Depp gives no sense of the man; it’s like he’s forgotten how to act. Bulger suffers two great tragedies and the narration – the film is told in flashback – tells us it changed him radically but there is no sign of it in his performance. He is the same unpleasant man at the end of the film as he is at the start, only with a few more prosthetics.

The big thing about Bulger was that his brother – Benedict Cumberbatch picking up another nice pay cheque for doing not much – was a local politician, a state senator. That’s an interesting story and if you want to see it check out the series Brotherhood starring Jason Isaacs as the Whitey character and Jason Clarke as his politico brother. It’s way better than this.